rss-bridge 2026-02-18T16:22:48+00:00

"Creativity is the key": how PC hardware's smaller manufacturers are navigating the RAM shortage disaster

Far from ushering in a technological golden age, artificial intelligence is giving PC hardware its most trying time in years. As huge, hyper-rich tech companies go about building resource-intensive AI data centres in pursuit of future wealth, the resulting memory chip shortages have detonated consumer-level pricing for RAM modules, graphics cards, SSDs, and even ancient hard drives.
Doubling or tripling street-level outlays without harming sales would, you’d think, make a lot of gaming gear makers – especially their accounting departments – very happy indeed. But as those chips have become a scarce commodity at the supplier level, even the bigger hardware businesses are being squeezed as well, and it shows. Razer can’t decide how much their next laptops should cost. Valve are running out of Steam Deck stock and delaying the new Steam Machine. Zotac Korea called the RAM shortage an existential threat. But what of the industry’s smaller players – those producers of the niche, the quirky, the retro?
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Specialist computer-makers aren’t exempt from RAMnarök – except when they are

[A Framework Laptop 16, broken down into its constituent parts.]

Image credit: Framework

Feature

by James Archer
Hardware Editor

Published on Feb. 18, 2026

19 comments

Doubling or tripling street-level outlays without harming sales would, you’d think, make a lot of gaming gear makers – especially their accounting departments – very happy indeed. But as those chips have become a scarce commodity at the supplier level, even the bigger hardware businesses are being squeezed as well, and it shows. Razer can’t decide how much their next laptops should cost. Valve are running out of Steam Deck stock and delaying the new Steam Machine. Zotac Korea called the RAM shortage an existential threat. But what of the industry’s smaller players – those producers of the niche, the quirky, the retro?

At face value, you might expect these to have succumbed to RAM malnutrition before anyone. As they tell it, however, strategy and circumstance are allowing gaming’s specialist manufacturers to endure the worst – if they’re even affected at all.

[The Commodore 64 Ultimate in its default beige colourway.]

Image credit: Commodore International

One 'tactic' has proven successful, effectively, by accident: just use less RAM. Released to gushing reviews late last year, just as memory shortages began to bite, the Commodore 64 Ultimate is a modernised but functionally faithful tribute to the computer-defining 1982 original, designed and built by a resurrected Commodore themselves. Chief technology officer Marc Bilodeau credits the Ultimate’s relatively meagre RAM specs, just 128MB of ye olde DDR2, for it never having been trampled in the industry’s rush to snap up DDR4 and DDR5 modules.

"Our choice of DDR2 instead of DDR5 really means we haven't been impacted that much, from the hardware manufacturing perspective," he explains to me. "Although this RAM shortage absolutely weighs into our decision on future designs and projects... we don't want to compromise on design at all. But at the same time, we have to be very strategic and remain cost effective for our products, from consumers’ perspectives. So we're watching this very closely, but at the moment, we're not seeing the pinch as other manufacturers are.

"This is something we're watching on a daily basis, because it is very unfortunate, in my opinion, what's happening out there. I mean, I want to upgrade my PC, and I'm watching those prices and hold them back because of it."

Another low-RAM device to have escaped supply pain is Panic’s wind-up handheld, the Playdate. While not as intentionally retro-styled as the C64 Ultimate, the Playdate’s chip hunger is even easier to sate: its 4GB of Flash storage is joined by a microscopic 16MB of integrated RAM. Its only recent price bump came in March 2025, well before the current crisis, and was blamed on the move to a new factory rather than individual part costs.

[The Playdate leans against a white wall, showing the standby clock onscreen and a banner saying new games are available]

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun

"Getting only 16MB of RAM per unit is not that difficult because it's such a small number," says Panic’s external PR rep Jurge Cruz-Alvarez. "Manufacturing Playdate is always a fun adventure - getting other parts in the past, like the CPU, was an issue back when there was a chip shortage - and working with the correct factory willing to work with Panic have been past problems they've had to solve, but RAM has thankfully not been one of them."

For manufacturers who do need to deal in modern, more capacious RAM and storage specs, being a little fish in a big, panicking pond can still have its advantages. Framework specialise in modular, highly customisable (and repairable) laptops, and recently launched their first model capable of high-end gaming: the Framework Laptop 16, which can be kitted out with Nvidia’s upper-mid-range RTX 5070 GPU. That’s not a cheap component, and nor are the DDR5 memory options it offers, but company founder Nirav Patel reckons that Framework benefit from a sort of reverse economy of scale: because they only need in-demand parts in small numbers, their own costs are lower, and the modular approach lets them offer cut-price laptops with no included RAM at all.

[Two hands fondle a Framework Laptop 16 on a blue table.]

Image credit: Framework

"We're in kind of a unique position. We’re not at a scale where we have these giant, long-term memory contract buys with the big players," he says. "But we're also big enough, and credible enough, that we have direct contact with all the key players we need to. So as a company, we're in a uniquely, almost advantaged spot in some ways, where at our volume we can go out into things like spot markets and buy chunks of memory that for a Dell, or HP, or Lenovo, or Apple would look at and say 'Well, that's a rounding error. We're not even gonna bother with that.' So we get to stay in production.

"The other part of it is that, because of our model of modularity and upgradeability for our laptops, the memory is all socketed. It's all it's all removable and upgradable, and we actually sell a configuration of our laptops, our DIY editions, without memory or storage pre-installed. So that means for consumers, they have a lot of flexibility, even in a world where, for whatever reason, we can't get access to a certain memory capacity or storage capacity, for example. Or we're getting access to it at a price that is higher than we would like it to be, or consumers would like it to be. Consumers can actually go out into the open market, even jumping onto eBay and seeing, 'Okay, what's out there, what's available.' Then pick up the memory that they can at the price that they can, and bring it on their own and drop it into the system."

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*Original source*